Thursday, 4 August 2016

Appdate

In response to a deluge of enquiries from fascinated readers, here is the state of my Android app so far. I can't pretend that it's a major breakthrough in the Android world, but it's a start and it's mine.

The first screen is the home screen, the first screen you get when you open the app. There's nothing fancy here; the Android development tools give you this for free. I have changed the colours and the title to match our website, but that's about it. The "Hello World" message is the standard one that tells you that you have created a basic app that works; it's easy enough to change (to, for example, something like the third screen) and I haven't bothered yet.

The second one is the menu, that you get by tapping the three horizontal lines ("the hamburger") at the top left of the first screen. The choice of menu items and icons is mine and replaces the standard ones that the developoment tools give you. There is a little work involved here but not much. I'll replace the "Android Studio" and other headers later.

Of the options, only "Piscine" and "Nous trouver" do anything today. Choosing "Piscine" gives you the third screen, and I spent some time here getting the two images to display side-by-side and scale correctly to different sizes of screen. Once I have got this to work for Piscine, the others are easy to do in the same way. If you choose "Nous trouver" you get a Google map that shows where we are on a map of North-West France. You can zoom in, and get directions to us from wherever you are. I wish I could show you the map, but when I try to, the emulator complains that I have to update Google Services, and when I try to, it crashes. If I succeed later, I'll put the picture below.

There's clearly a lot left to do. I need to make the "Share" button work, which should be an interesting challenge, and I need to either remove the green envelope picture (easy) or get it to invoke some kind of contact process (hard). But the next thing I need to do is to sort the navigation. At the moment, to get from, say, the "piscine" screen to "restauration", the user has to touch the back button, then the hamburger, then the restauration button. Tedious; there needs to be a hamburger on each screen. I've been having a go at doing this, it's a well-worn path for Android programmers I'm sure, but I haven't worked out how to do it yet.

Don't expect rapid progress; this is an evenings-and-weekends thing, and only for when I haven't got anything better to do. And I haven't had a glass of wine.

Me

By a beautiful river valley in North-West France. This blog is about the day-to-day events in running a group gîte in Mayenne. There's a lot of gardening, maintenance, but, I hope, a lot of fun too.
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